msg, fatty duck, why?. ever since we moved to the deep south hills area of pittsburgh, i've had to drive long distances to find reasonable to good thai food. so, when a colleague mentioned to me that there is a thai restaurant in dormont, i resolved to try it out and that brought me and my family to the thai spoon on a recent friday night.
the place is very small with ten or so tables and parking can be a challenge on potomac avenue, but there is a municipal parking lot around the corner and we lucked into a table for four without reservations. (people who came in right after us were told that they would have an hour wait for a table!) the decor is nothing to write home about, and the place is byob as we noticed when almost every other table brought their own wine bottles with them.
the menu is pleasingly large and appears to have a wide variety of items on it. while they had some of the traditional thais dishes - like pad thai, tom yum, colorful curries - i was puzzled by the lack of some other common dishes like lar nar, mee krob, and phat see ew. there was also a list of specials, but no indication of how often those change. we ordered three appetizers including the special corn cake, a chicken dumpling and tom yum soup to share. then, for the main meal, we shared the thai hot pot, duck on board, and spicy noodles. as is usual at thai restaurants we were asked how spicy to make our dishes on a scale of 1 to 10. not knowing the tendencies of the kitchen staff, we asked for everything to be at level 6 - but because we do like very spicy food, we also asked for the hot sauce or powder so we can amp it up if necessary.
the corn fritters were deep fried and extremely greasy. luckily they came with some sort of yellowish liquid with peanut chunks on the side whose acidity cut the greasiness by quite a bit. unfortunately, besides the grease, there was no distinctive flavor to these fritters and they were very disappointing. the chicken dumplings were similarly bland, but the soy sauce based sauce that came with them at least solved that problem. the tom yum soup was satisfyingly hot and had many vegetables and chucks of tofu in it and was tasty. as far as spice level goes, we saw the red powder floating in the broth, but did not notice much of a spice kick to the soup itself.
we chose the duck on board because the waitress assured us that this is the version of duck that would be least fatty. as it turned out, this was one of the two most disappointing things about the meal. the duck was so fatty that we took almost all of the chunks out of the dish and discarded them. they were inedible. this was unfortunate as the dish itself is served with thin noodles in a bowl with a curry based broth that was actually very good. i would have liked more vegetable in there, and, of course, some duck pieces that i could eat, but the base was good.
the spicy noodles were not spicy - they were very salty and had lots and lots of fish sauce as the main flavoring component. too much for my taste. the thai treasure hot pot was another broth based dish which was also very salty, but at least had more different flavors than just salt. all of these dishes were very bland on their spice level. i would characterize them as a 2 on that 'one to ten' scale and we made liberal use of the condiments provided.
we saw one of the other tables get a dessert of black rice and what looked like ripe mangos and decided to order that as well. when it came the rice was significantly undercooked so that it was still crunchy on the inside. the rice was covered by a sweet coconut milk and sugar sauce which lent it much sweetness which was needed to cover the saltiness of the rice. what we thought was sliced mango turned out to be some sort of custard. what it was, i cannot tell you since there were no flavor hints to judge by.
as you can see from my descriptions of the food, the prevailing flavor was salt. one of our members is sensitive to msg - gets headaches from eating it - and by the time we got home, the headache was raging. all of us gulped large quantities of water both at the restaurant as well as when we got back home - another clue that msg was used very liberally.
i guess that when i am in the mood for thai food again, i will still have to drive long distances as thai spoon will not be on my list of places to revisit.